As shown in the Park City Museum’s latest exhibit (up through March next year), Parkites are no stranger to putting on a parade. We gather to celebrate our town and country with a variety of displays. The most notable parades are, of course, the large Fourth of July and Miners’ Day parades down Main Street and Park Avenue, but other local favorites include the Olympic homecoming parades and the annual Howl-o-ween dog parade. For a long time, Park City had a parade each year on Memorial Day, previously Decoration Day and a few other names before Memorial Day gained broader popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, with the holiday officially recognized as a federal holiday in 1971. In reporting on Memorial Day festivities, The Park Record most often called it Memorial Day, but also used Decoration Day — and sometimes both in the same article! The first reported celebration with a parade occurred in 1891, in which a parade moved from Main Street toward both cemeteries (Park City and Glenwood), where bands played, Parkites decorated graves, and speakers gave tribute. The Park Record noted that “a large number of people went to the burying grounds and all felt that the memory of departed comrades, relatives and friends had received just tribute.” The following year, the paper shared that “arrangements have been perfected for one of the largest parades and most interesting ceremonies ever held on a like occasion      in this camp.” The Park Record was prone to exaggeration for much of its history, especially when it came to describing parades, but this early in our history, the description was probably fairly accurate. The 1890s saw a general enthusiasm with the holiday, with Park City hosting a parade and ceremonies at the cemeteries each year. The record generally goes silent for the early 1900s, before kicking back in every year again in the 1910s and continuing into the 1940s. The parades in this period usually started around Welsh, Driscoll and Buck and continued to one or both of the cemeteries, where the ceremonial aspects of the holiday took place. For the 1911 parade, The Park Record described “crowds of people winding their way to the silent cities of the dead, laden with flowers to strew, on the last resting place of loved ones gone before.” Over the course of time, different groups helped to organize the festivities, but the Frank E. Peterson American Legion post No. 14 in Park City managed the year-to-year operations. Sometimes they asked the town’s numerous fraternal organizations to join the parade, while in other years they focused on youth participants with Scout troops and junior and high school bands. The Park City Military Band was always a mainstay in addition to the Legion. After the end of World War II, ironically enough, support for the holiday declined in Park City, with no mentions of a parade in the paper since 1947. This, of course, coincides with Park City’s decline as a whole before pivoting to a ski resort economy in 1963. Parades did happen until at least then, as the museum collections contain a few photographs from that year’s Memorial Day parade. While a parade on Memorial Day fell out of favor, cemetery visitation continued and by the 1980s was being promoted by the Glenwood Cemetery Association. Today, the museum hosts an annual ceremony at the Glenwood each final Monday in May. “Park City Loves A Parade: Our Parades, Processions and Protests from Past to Present” runs in the museum’s Tozer Gallery until April 4, 2027. Learn all about the creative and interesting ways Parkites have celebrated our town, mourned our loved ones, and stood up for our beliefs. Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum research coordinator. The post Way We Were: Parading to the cemetery appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less